Stop blaming racism in the housing market and start looking at your parents as the root cause

A recent Statistics Canada report looks at the “housing trajectories” of young Canadians by race and age. Housing trajectory refers to the process of starting off living in your parents’ house rent-free, moving out to become a renter, and then later owning a house. If Canada is as racist as FHA claims, whites should have a much easier time navigating this trajectory than others.

The results do reveal significant variations between races, but nothing that smacks of white supremacy. In fact, “South Asian and Chinese people had the highest rates [of home ownership] from early adulthood to middle age,” the report finds. The outcome for white age cohorts is as much as 24 percentage points below that of South Asians and Chinese. Blacks and Latin Americans, on the other hand, were the least likely to own a home by middle-age, with ownership rates 3 to 19 percentage points below that for whites.

“The large homeownership disparities observed among different population groups in their 20s were primarily attributed to differences in their tendency to live in the parental home,” the report observes, noting that differences in “family housing resources” shape future outcomes.

If we are to believe that Canada is a country defined by racial discrimination, it appears white supremacists are doing a rather poor job of it. Based on the observed results, the chief culprits behind any racist takeover of Canada must instead be Asian. Or is there a more convincing explanation closer to home?

According to Kearney’s research, cultural norms push Asian families to get and stay married regardless of other factors; this likely explains why they tend to congregate at the top of the leaderboard in so many categories. Other racial groups, blacks in particular, have much higher rates of single-parent families.

Despite the FHA’s bluster that Canada’s housing market is fraught with racism, the evidence suggests observed racial variances are much more likely the result of factors within a household’s own control, and in particular marriage. What is widely decried as racism today is thus primarily a problem of the family. And as such, it requires family-based solutions far beyond the remit of government.

As British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wryly noted, the secret to a long and happy life is to “choose your parents wisely.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.